​More than five years ago, the National Science Foundation funded the creation of the Center for Dynamic Data Analytics (CDDA), an Industry/University Cooperative Research Center (I/UCRC), at Stony Brook University. As a result of the first phase of this I/UCRC and with Department of Computer Science (CS) chair Arie Kaufman serving as CDDA’s co-director, Stony Brook University became a leader in developing industry research partnerships.

With the goal of building on the success of the CDDA, in February 2017 Kaufman and fellow researchers were awarded new funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), paving the way for Stony Brook to become a university partner in the I/UCRC Center for Visual and Decision Informatics (CVDI).

CVDI will be the country’s largest I/UCRC in the field of big data. CVDI is a collaboration between academia, industry, and government to develop cutting edge tools and techniques necessary to handle the demands of large data volume endeavors, such as visual analytics and machine learning. The university partners of CVDI include Stony Brook University, Drexel University, and University of Louisiana at Lafayette, University of Virginia, and Tampere University of Technology in Finland. Brigham Young University and the University of North Carolina-Charlotte are expected to join in 2017.

In Phase I, CVDI completed 35 distinct projects and generated 88 new publications. In Phase 2, with Stony Brook now an active partner, the entire I/UCRC seeks to double those figures. There are 17 faculty members from Stony Brook who will be working with industry researchers on a variety of projects. Many of the following faculty members contributed to the accomplishments during the CDDA phase and some of the projects they will target through CVDI are:

Arie Kaufman – Dr. Kaufman, who is also the Chief Scientist at the Center for Wireless Information Technology (CEWIT) and specializes in visualization, virtual reality; will focus on immersive, big data analytics; and virtual diagnosis.

Rong Zhao – Zhao is the Managing Site Director for CVDI at Stony Brook and he will focus on a number of center strategies associated with data mining, machine learning, and medical informatics, as well as mobile applications.

Rob Kelly – Kelly is Co-Chair of the CS department and in addition to information systems projects, Dr. Kelly will focus on the development of a trusted management systems.​

Dimitris Samaras – Computer vision and machine learning are Samaras’ research areas and through CVDI partnerships he will examine dynamic facial analysis.​

Minh Hoai Nguyen – Nguyen spends his research time on human activity recognition and semantic video analysis, and his CVDI research seeks to conduct an automated continuous infrastructure assessment using dash cams.​

Michael Kifer – Kifer’s research focus is declarative languages for data and knowledge manipulation and as a CVDI researcher he will work on knowledge management research for decision support.​

Jie Gao – An expert in computational geometry and sensor networks, geometric and topological analysis on trajectory sensing and understanding social influence is the focus of Gao’s CVDI research.​

IV Ramakrishnan – Ramakrishnan will apply the amazing patient-care research he has done through NIH to CVDI, including the study of real-time automated delivery of alerts for adverse reactions.

CVDI “seeks to conduct multi-disciplinary, cross-institutional, pre-competitive research and develop the next generation technologies in data science, big data, analytics, data acquisition and management, and data visualization.” Each member university will receive funding from the NSF for a minimum of five more years to encourage industry outreach and educational opportunities for students.

Companies that worked with CDDA during the first I/UCRC phase included Northrop Grumman Aerospace Corporation, Softheon, CA Technologies, Samsung, BioClinica, and Mobileware. Some of these companies and many more are expected to take advantage of the CVDI research model.

The Department of Computer Science at Stony Brook University, which is part of the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, is the perfect fit for an endeavor such as CVDI. Its facilities boast over 20 research laboratories and include the Reality Deck, a highly unique visualization facility designed and built specifically for mass data.

Moving forward into Phase II is sure to produce many exciting new projects, which will only add to the already impressive body of work completed by Stony Brook researchers in the previous phase. The recent renewal extends the life of CVDI into 2022 and the first spring meeting of the CVDI Industrial Advisory Board is in April 2017.